Authors Electric

Peter Duck and me in Felixstowe I was passing a traffic lights where there were two primary school girls waiting. My car window was open and I heard what they said. "Oh, it's the orfer!" I waved like crazy and they waved back. You can keep your red carpet and your paparazzi, popping flash-bulbs and I really can't be bothered with a paving slab in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. To be identified as an author by a couple of Felixstowe primary school kids (who almost certainly won't have read my books) made me deeply, deeply happy. It happened last year as well. I was walking to Felixstowe Library to help give out the medals for the summer reading challenge and there were three or four children playing in a street nearby. No chance they were going to be getting a certificate for reading their six books over the summer holiday but still I heard them say, “That's Julia Jones. She's an Orfer. She came to our school.” That was what had mattered, nothing...

          Last weekend I arrived bright and early at the Orwell Hotel, Felixstowe, Suffolk expecting to put a few handouts on seats, deliver an optimistic box of books for sale, shove a memory stick into a laptop and waltz away for coffee with a friend before returning to spend a happy hour talking about 'Boats and Books' whilst flicking contentedly through my Power Point presentation.           It wasn't quite that simple. This was the first Book Festival event of the day in the wonderfully named 'His Lordship's Library,' and the sound engineers were hard at work. They were perfectionists; the rest of us were a trifle ad hoc  and possibly de trop . The festival organiser had loaned us her laptop and it needed to be woken from deep slumber before it could be persuaded to link to the projector. There was a wireless mouse which would only squeak in one direction – either I could go forw...